In Roman times the agricultural region was governed from
Aquinum, the modern Aquino. Some Roman remains have been retrieved from a
villa site at Sant'Oliva. The medieval commune dates from 860, when Rodoaldo, the
Lombard gastaldo of Aquino, erected the first version of the walled fortification on the
rocca, intended to guard the bridgehead from
Saracen intruders coming up the Liri. The castle's chapel seems to have been dedicated to
Saint Bartholomew; on the ruins of the Lombard
castello was erected the earliest Cathedral of San Bartolomeo of which the
campanile was a rebuilding of the castellan's tower. Two medieval quarters developed,
Cività within the walls and
Pastine in the meadows between the city walls and the river. The little bridgehead settlement formed part of the
County of Capua; there in 866
Louis II, Holy Roman Emperor, set up camp at Pontecorvo in campaigns against the Saracens. In 960 Atenulf succeeded in attaching Pontecorvo to his gastaldate of Aquino; at his death his lands were divided into a county of Aquino and a county of Pontecorvo. In 1065 the
Normans conquered the region and attached Pontecorvo to the Norman county of
Gaeta, but the
abbot of Monte Cassino purchased it in 1105, and maintained a precarious hold on it for over four centuries. The first communal statute, among the earliest in the
Kingdom of Naples, was granted in 1190, signalling a new era of civic self-confidence in a period in which Pontecorvo was briefly conquered and ruled by
Roger II of Sicily, was claimed by the papacy, and was sacked by
Charles of Anjou. During the
Western Schism, Pontecorvo allied with
antipope Clement VII in opposition to the local power of Monte Cassino. Although just within the territory of the
Kingdom of Naples, the town was an exclave of the
Papal States from 1463, when the
comune placed itself under papal jurisdiction, until it was captured by the
French army in the
Napoleonic Wars. == Principality ==